Meet the 2026 Impact Award Winners

Grant Norton, MBA, MS, CHFP, CRCR, is Director, Revenue Cycle Process Improvement at St. Mary’s Healthcare in Amsterdam, NY. Since joining St. Mary’s in February 2023 as a senior business analyst, Grant quickly earned a reputation for his collaborative approach and sharp eye for improving billing and revenue cycle workflows, leading to his promotion to director just over a year later. Before stepping into revenue cycle leadership, he built a diverse healthcare operations background across New York’s Capital Region, including roles as practice manager for system outreach at Albany Med Health System, performance consultant for the Healthy Alliance social care network, and manager of pediatrics at Ellis Medicine. Grant is also a contributor to the MEDITECH Blog, where he writes on strategies for improving cash flow and streamlining revenue cycle operations.

Grant was named Innovator of the Year for leading a sustainable revenue cycle transformation at St. Mary’s Healthcare, a mid-size, independent Disproportionate Share Hospital serving a low-income, vulnerable community in Amsterdam, NY. Grant and his team consolidated the hospital’s outpatient practices onto a single Meditech EHR and integrated it with Inovalon Revenue Cycle solutions to power a modern, automated revenue cycle workflow.

Over a two-year period, St. Mary’s added more than 60 providers and grew monthly claims volume 26.8% (from 35,500 to 45,000) without expanding the billing team. By leveraging more than 100 Meditech and clearinghouse rules to automate account validation, the organization cut clearinghouse billing edits nearly 49% (from 10,049 to 5,095), while real-time visibility through Expanse Revenue Cycle’s Financial Status Desktop strengthened financial oversight and accelerated cash collections.

Susan Goldberg is Director, Accreditation and Patient Safety at Northern Arizona Healthcare, where she leads systemwide efforts to advance a culture of safety, transparency, and accountability across the organization’s more than 4,000 caregivers. Susan brings deep expertise in healthcare quality and regulatory affairs, having previously served as Associate Executive Director, Quality and Regulatory Affairs, and Chief Quality Officer at NYC Health + Hospitals, where she focused on quality assurance and regulatory compliance within one of the nation’s largest public health systems. Earlier in her career, she progressed from Director to Vice President of Organizational Performance at Maimonides Medical Center, and held quality management roles at NYU Downtown Hospital, including Director of Quality Management and Senior Quality Assurance Analyst. Her decades of experience in performance improvement and patient safety leadership culminated in Northern Arizona Healthcare’s 2025 ECRI Safety Excellence Award, recognizing the systemwide safety transformation Susan helped lead.

Susan was named Healthcare Hero for leading the transformation of patient safety from the responsibility of a few into a shared responsibility across more than 4,000 caregivers at Northern Arizona Healthcare. By integrating Just Culture principles with the leadership philosophy of Extreme Ownership, and using Inovalon’s Safety Management solution as the foundation for event reporting, investigation, and organizational learning, the organization redesigned its daily multidisciplinary safety briefings and launched monthly CEO Safety Lunches that gave every employee direct access to executive leadership.

These efforts have generated more than 177 implemented safety initiatives. In fiscal year 2025, safety event reporting rose 19% year-over-year to 5,276 events, with roughly 11% classified as Good Catch or Near Miss reports. Staff confidence in reporting errors without fear of punishment climbed from the 48th to the 62nd percentile, and the organization’s culture of transparency and accountability earned Northern Arizona Healthcare the 2025 ECRI Safety Excellence Award.